Margaret Atwood is writing a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, inspired by 'the world we're living in'

Margaret Atwood has announced she is writing a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale – three decades after it was published, and inspired by the state of the modern world.

Called The Testaments, the book will be based 15 years after the final scene of the original, which depicted life under a totalitarian regime in the United States.

Set in the near-future, in a fictional republic called Gilead, The Handmaid’s Tale tells of a land where infertility had resulted in women being used as “Handmaids” to carry the children of high-ranking men in government-dictated relationships.

The sequel, Atwood explained, sprung from both reader reaction to the seminal 1985 book, recently turned into a cult television show, and “the world we’re living in”.

Announcing on Twitter the new work, Atwood said the sequel would be “narrated by three female characters.” The 79-year-old shared a video with the news, which quoted her saying: “Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’re living in.”

Upon its release, The Handmaid’s Tale instantly sparked debate and praise from critics, and was swiftly grouped with other dystopian classics such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

However, the book has gained new interest in the past two years, as dystopian fiction increased in popularity after Donald Trump won the U.S. election.

In the same year, 2016, U.S. streaming service Hulu adapted Atwood’s novel, placing Elisabeth Moss as the central character Offred – to award-winning acclaim.

Atwood did not mention Trump when she announced the new book, but the press release noted that The Handmaid’s Tale had become “a symbol of the movement against him, standing for female empowerment and resistance in the face of misogyny and the rolling back of women’s rights around the world”.

The original book was also based on events that took place in history.

Elisabeth Moss as Offred in a scene from, “The Handmaid’s Tale.

In 2001, Atwood wrote that she based part of the Handmaids’ cloaks and their associations of wearing them on the chador worn by Afghan women that she had seen in the country, shortly before war broke out in the early Seventies.

Sixteen years later she wrote another piece for The New York Times, in which she said: “One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened… nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the Devil.”

For instance, she explained: “The Republic of Gilead is built on a foundation of the 17th-century Puritan roots that have always lain beneath the modern-day America we thought we knew.”

When the book was adapted, it was placed in a setting that didn’t exist when Atwood wrote it: after 2010. But many noted the eeriness of watching a dystopia that was so positioned in the near-future.

It is not yet known if Atwood will channel more recent events, such as the continuing political battle over female reproductive rights in the US, into The Testaments.